


Silent Heart

by cognomen



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Growing Up Together, M/M, Past Fic, timestamps
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-23
Updated: 2016-06-23
Packaged: 2018-07-16 18:55:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7280668
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cognomen/pseuds/cognomen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>At six years old, Ben is a veteran of space travel. His life has been a series of journeys at his mother's side, and he has a sense for the usual order of such things.</i>
</p>
<p> <i>This time, it's different from the usual ambassadorial missions, different from his visits to Uncle Luke, where they spend all their time talking about boring things. He knows it's different because his mother looks sad. Looks out the port window of the big yacht-class starship that's become a second home for both of them and says nothing.</i></p>
<p>In which Poe and Ben didn't exactly grew up together, but experienced life in a parallel so close they sometimes touched.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 1

At six years old, Ben is a veteran of space travel. His life has been a series of journeys at his mother's side, and he has a sense for the usual order of such things.

This time, it's different from the usual ambassadorial missions, different from his visits to Uncle Luke, where they spend all their time talking about boring things. He knows it's different because his mother looks sad. Looks out the port window of the big yacht-class starship that's become a second home for both of them and says nothing.

Sometimes, she looks at him and gets sad. He doesn't have the words - they won't quite line up in his mind - to ask about her unease. He feels it like a broadcast over the holo-comm channels. Second-hand and faint. Sharp, but stale. He can't hide from his mother, so he hides _with_ her, instead.

Ben wraps an arm around her leg and presses his side into it, wishing she would pick him up. The fact that she's bigger than he is and warm reassures him. Her hand settles on the back of his head, fingers ever so gentle in his hair. Fond. He feels that, too.

"Don't worry, Mama," Ben says, squeezing her a little, because he likes it best when she does that to him.

She slides her hand over his hair again. "I have to worry a little."

It doesn't seem right to Ben. "Where are we going? Is it scary?"

"Not at all," she says. "It's lovely. There are so many trees the whole planet looks green. It's a moon, near Yavin."

"Like from the battle?" Ben asks, knowing there were a lot of battles not so long ago. The adults talk about them a lot, in confusing ways. Sometimes it sounds like they wish they were still fighting. They speak about flights and runs and victories and close calls. Sometimes they say names and talk about death and sound sad. Ben believes that battles are way more like the first part.

"Yes," his mother says. "Some old friends who fought in that battle live there, and we're going to see them."

"Okay," Ben says. "But if they're friends, why are you worried?"

His mother turns in his grip, crouching down in front of him. She puts her hands on his shoulders, warm and reassuring.

"There's a boy there, just about your age. He's lost his mother, just two days ago," she says. She looks very, very sad.

"Where did she go?" Ben asks. His mother must want to help look for her.

Her gaze softens, and she pulls him against her gently, holding on with all her strength.

"Away beyond the stars," she says.

It's the first time he understands not everything lost can be found again.

-

The boy, when Ben meets him, is sitting alone at the edge of the settlement. he has dark and red-rimmed eyes, puffy and pink under his long, black lashes. He's looking into the far distance beneath the trees that ring the cleared land very closely, like crouching giants. He seems very far away even when Ben climbs up onto the rock-wall next to him.

Ben has never been charged with anyone so close to his own age. His mother has asked him for this - perhaps because she knows he wants a playmate. Someone his own age. 

"What's the droid for?" the boy asks, glancing at Ben and then past. It's the first indication that he's noticed he isn't alone.

"I am See-Threepio," C-3P0 explains, overriding Ben's chance for an introduction. "Human-Cyborg relations."

The boy looks at C-3P0 blankly for a long moment, then seems to process that he's clearly a protocol droid. He hesitates for a long moment, then his gaze flicks up and sidelong to Ben.

He smiles a little, slow and sad. In other circumstances, Ben bets, he smiles a lot. He looks like a kid who smiles, like it's at home on his features - a song written for a certain instrument. 

"Your babysitter, huh?" he asks.

"Babysitters are for babies," Ben protests, tartly. He wishes C-3P0 wouldn't follow him around so much.

"You're a baby," the boy says.

Ben bristles - the boy is smaller than he is, shorter. "I am not."

"Well," the boy says, "it's not so bad to be a baby."

Ben wheels on him, meeting his tired -but-amused expression. "I'm six."

"I'm Poe," the boy says. "And I'm eight."

Ben eyes him skeptically, no stranger to bragging. This isn't that. Just genuine truth, delivered as a fact.

"I'm Ben," he says.

"Your Mom' the General?" Poe asks. By mutual agreement, they've both turned their backs on C-3P0.

"She used to be," Ben says. "Now she works for the New Republic."

Poe gets that look in his eyes, the one Ben has grown used to seeing directed at his mother. He feels the same way, but he's cognizant of the fact that it's strange for others to feel that way - after all, he's never felt that way about anyone else's mother.

"Is she here?" Poe asks.

Ben hears the question a lot. "She's with your dad."

Then he does something strange. Instead of rushing off to meet her, he looks at _Ben_ with a new aw3e.

"My mom was in the Rebels with yours," Poe says.

"Oh," Ben says, surprised. "I thought just your-"

"She was a pilot," he says, proudly. "Like Luke Skywalker."

For a moment, the quiet, tortured look is gone from Poe's eyes. "Shara Bey."

"Sorry about your mom, Poe," Ben says, because it's what he's supposed to.

Poe's expression changes, and he looks away over the fields and toward the tree in the center of the yard. The tree seems to sing out from the rest of the landscape somehow, catching Ben's attention and holding it as if it were sticky.

"I'm sorry too," Poe says, and then he hops down from the stone wall and wanders away, heading in the direction his eyes take him.

Ben has a premonition - he doesn't quite understand the word - or why they happen, but he knows to put the word to the feeling that the vast future is collapsing down to this moment, folding like flimsi back on itself.

Poe Dameron will follow his eyes forward from now on.

-


	2. 2

It's a lifetime later when Ben returns to Yavin IV. He's 12, now separated from the comforting presence of his mother and returning now as Luke's student. So much has changed that when Luke mentions a stop at Yavin, with his usual maddening lack of detail as to why, Ben's mind only rings the faintest bell.

"Why are we going out so far?" Ben asks, frustrated by the potential for several weeks in space, too closet o the master Jedi to even _practice_ some of his new knowledge.

"There's something I want to check on," Luke says, watching Ben's reaction. 

Ben reminds himself of what his benefactor has told him - for now, he must learn both paths. The control that Luke offers will make the release that his other master allows more potent. So, he composes himself to calmness and pushes his frustration aside.

"Alright," Ben says, cautiously. He knows why he has to go along with Luke. He knows why Luke never leaves him behind to train with the other students.

Luke claps him on the shoulder proudly and it stings, not from the force of it, but from the impact of Luke's pleasure in his progress.

If only he knew the steps forward are not because of his teaching and endless exercises on the points of calm and patience, but in spite of them. His other teacher has given him a vent and told him that patience will eventually be rewarded. He can wait for his reward.

-

He recognizes the place instantly when he sees it from space, wondering for only a moment that Luke's business and Leia's past shared an aspect. He supposes - if nothing major has changed - that they'll see the Damerons again. 

"Did we come to see the tree?" Ben asks, as they step out of the transport.

he has seen one like it at the Jedi temple and nowhere else. An easier addition problem than his tutors used to present him with, now that his visual memory has lined up.

"In part," Luke says. "I need to pay my respects to some old friends, too."

R2-D2 rolls down the ramp onto the grass after Luke, slowing down as the terrain becomes more difficult. Ben watches the droid head straight through the gap in the stone wall like he owns the place.

"Should I come with you, Master Luke?" 

"Is there somewhere else you'd rather be?" Luke asks, as if he already knows. He probably does.

"I have a friend here," Ben says, hoping for a chance to be alone - to vent some of the frustration. Maybe to contact his benefactor if he can get a clear signal from someplace private. But the lie is true enough that Luke shouldn't suspect...

Luke smiles, and lets Ben go. "Keep your communication nearby."

The green of the woods calls Ben still - the pull of gravity here is strange and the softness of grass beneath his shoes is still unfamiliar. He'd grown up with the universe underfoot and overhead. The rest, even though Luke travels far less than Leia ever had and the Jedi Temple is definitely planetside, Ben is still getting used to.

At the edge of the woods, he finds the old stone wall. He reaches out to run his hand over the uneven surface, looking for a way through the undergrowth beyond, following the curve of the boundary around behind the house.

He almost trips over a droid - an unfamiliar model lingering on a pad of paint stained cobblestones and half covered in masking. The scent of paint is fresh, but the droid isn't deactivated, and pivots its dome-shaped head around to look up at him, beeping a query.

"Sorry," Ben says, an instinct. He doesn't really mean it, but he's spent enough time around droids to know it's easier to lie to them if you wanted them to drop the subject faster.

The droid repeats the query, and while it's in astromech binary, it takes Ben a long time to decipher it. R2 speaks in a completely different way, littered with euphemisms and colorful means of expression.

"I was just looking for a trail into the jungle," Ben explains. "I wanted a place to train."

The droid doesn't seem to know what to make of that. It rotates the optical lens on its dome sharply back toward the group of buildings that make up the settlement. There's an assortment of farming machines and harvesters arranged between greenhouses, but Ben sees one shape that stands out from the others.

It's a starship - a fighter from the era of Galactic conflict. It matches the astromech droid - half covered in a tarp and masking and paint primer.

Quaint. Ben is so amused by how out of place it seems, grounded in these green fields. A farm boy's dream. The pair of legs protruding from beneath confirm this - and Ben forgets his other errand for the moment, investigating.

The boy that emerges when Ben knocks politely on the side of the A-Wing is wiry, short, half covered in engine grease in black and pink smears on his face and clothes. For all this, he gives the impression of an effortless puberty, and the developing muscles that hard work gives.

Whatever Ben had been about to say pours out of his thoughts like water through a sieve.

"Hello," he says instead, feeling like an idiot when he can't find any other words.

"Hey," the boy says, peering up from the ground. "Aren't you hot?"

The question seems initially nonsensical - until Ben realizes the difference in how they're dressed. He's wearing Jedi robes, the other boy is wearing a sleeveless shirt that shows a lot of sun-touched tan skin on his collarbone and arms. 

"No," Ben says, suddenly self conscious. He feels too clean, too detached from the land and setting. "We came in from space."

Poe cocks his head, looking at Ben, perhaps trying to place him in time and space within his memory. There's a faint, deep spark in his eyes.

"What brings you back to Yavin IV?" Poe asks, curious. Intent.

Ben knows the look - recognizes the echoing eagerness of someone ready to get out.

"I came with Master Luke," Ben says. "Something to do with your tree."

Poe looks away across the yard, and Ben misses being looked at by him. He instinctively seeks the tree. It's grown a lot in the years since Ben had seen it last, reaching upwards and outward. The leaves have a faint blue color, vibrant and healthy. There's no mistaking it, even without the confirmation of Master Skywalker standing under it.

"What about it?" Poe says, absently producing a rag that's more oil-stained than he is to wipe his hands on.

"To be able to tell you, I would have to be considered worthy of Master Luke's confidence," Ben says, spilling out more confidence and vitriol than he intended. It had just bubbled up and poured over.

Poe glances at him, but he doesn't laugh or look concerned.

"Well," he says, and he looks so serious that Ben suddenly remembers he's older and believes it despite how short he is. "They dont' want the past they had to be the future for us."

It's the sort of thing Ben's mother might have said, before she sent him away. Ben is struck for a moment by and intense longing to be back with her. Maybe it's the knowledge that for Poe, that option is gone.

Then Poe breaks the tension with an easy smile. "My dad's over-protective, too."  
-

**Author's Note:**

> So this is for KnightPilot week and I'm sorry I couldn't get it typed up until it was already halfway over. There's a couple more chapters, and I'm also working on at least one other thing. I'll try to get these up quickly. Feel free to come yell at me (or with me, I love to yell with people) on tumblr: http://shawarma-palace.tumblr.com 


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